Medical Marijuana Gets Teen Kicked Out of School

Imagine this. You are a normal, everyday high school student. A good kid by any definition. In a cruel twist of fate, you have a medical condition that causes you to have seizures. Sometimes those seizures last more than 24 hours, requiring some serious medication to control. Your doctors have already prescribed various narcotics, including morphine, and nothing really seems to do the trick. So they decide to try you on medical marijuana, in the form of a lozenge. Lo and behold, it works!

It’s a complete miracle -- suddenly you can function again and have a normal life. Except, you can’t. Your school’s drug policy states that any possession of marijuana is banned, even if it’s a lozenge already digesting in your stomach.

This takes the medical marijuana debate to a whole new level.

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The boy in question attends high school in Colorado Springs, where there is a zero-tolerance policy for drugs in the schools. Understandable.

But this boy has a doctor’s prescription. He’s not bringing the medicine to school. In fact, his family moved just so that he could go home when needed to take the medicine. Now the school says it’s a case of “internal possession,” meaning the drug is inside the boy.

Come on! It’s not like he’s swallowing balloons of heroin! He’s not a mule. He’s not going to cough up the lozenge so he can sell it to other kids.

No doubt there are other kids in that school on prescription medication every bit as “dangerous” as pot. Kids with bipolar might be on any number of anti-psychotics and benzos. Take five Klonopin and you’ll be waaaay more screwed up than you'd be on one piece of pot candy. And do we even need to talk about Adderall? Kids sell those things left and right, sometimes at $20 a pop. But if they have a prescription, it’s allowed in the schools. This kid goes home, takes his medication responsibly, and wants to come back to school. But because his medication is marijuana, he’s not allowed to.

That seems awfully screwed up to me. Perhaps it’s time the system revisits its policy on drugs in the schools.